What is mixed methods research?
Whether it’s Fortune 500 companies or tiny startups, people are recognizing the value of building products with a user-first methodology.
But it’s not enough to merely say “we’re doing research”, it has to be the right UX research. Research that combines richness of different people’s experiences and behavioral insights with tangible numbers and metrics. Key to this is an approach called mixed methods research.
Here, we’ll dive into the what and why of mixed methods research and cover a few examples of the approach.
Mixed methods isn’t some overly complicated practice that’ll take years to master — it simply refers to answering research questions through a combination of qualitative and quantitative data. This might mean running both interviews and surveys as part of a research project or complementing diary study data with analytics looking at the usage of a particular feature.
A basic mixed methods question could be: “What are the key tasks people perform on my website?”. To answer this, you’d look at analytics to understand how people navigate through the page and conduct user interviews to better understand why they use the page in the first place. We’ve got more examples below.
It makes sense: using both qualitative and quantitative methods to answer a single research question will mean you’re able to build a more complete understanding of the topic you’re investigating. Quantitative data will tell you what is happening and help you understand magnitude, while qualitative data can tell you why something is happening. Each type of data has its shortcomings, and by using a mixed methods approach you’re able to generate a clearer overall picture.
